In fact, they have applications to something as ubiquitous and mundane as making a purchase online. Every time you enter your credit card number on the Internet, prime numbers spring into action.

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography.

In one of the most hilarious papers we have read this year, two scientists challenged some famous quantum factorization ...

The result is shorter run times for algorithms such as prime number testing. New and increasingly powerful computer chips have allowed prime-number hunters to find increasingly larger primes.

An online collective, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, crunched numbers for days on end to discover a new prime number in December 2017. Here’s why it’s so important.

The quest to find more prime numbers may seem frivolous, but they hold practical applications as well, such as the generation of public key cryptography algorithms, hash tables, and as random ...

This number has 22,338,618 digits, the last of which is a 1, and is nearly 5 million digits longer than the previous record prime.

Numbers might not sound like they need discovering, but a crowd-sourced project has now identified the largest prime number known. The number was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime ...